User:Montecara/Sandbox 0

If you're Montecaran...

• You believe deep down in your country's independence. We endured the centuries for a reason.
• You're familiar with
• Or if not:
• You know how football (ballonpèt) is played -- after all, you played it in school, and Montecara has one of the best national teams in the world.
• You get about 30 days' vacation a year.

If you died tonight...

• You're Saturnalian, but don't think much about religion in general.
• You think of foreign fast food chains as cheap (and bad) food for tourists.
• You own a mobile phone and a TV, and if you're older than 30, a landline phone. Your place isn't heated in the winter, but it probably has either central A/C if newer or fancier and a portable air conditioner if not. Either way, it has its own toilet and shower rooms. Your laundry gets picked up once a week by a Karazawi lady who takes it away and brings it back nice and clean. You don't kill your own food. You don't have a dirt floor. You eat at a table, sitting on chairs.
• You don't consider dogs, cats, monkeys, or guinea pigs to be food. You do, however, eat sea slugs, snails, frogs, and other slimy things, and people used to eat songbirds.
• A toilet has a toilet in it. A bath doesn't -- it has a shower and maybe a tub.
• It seems natural to you that the telephone system, railroads, major airline, and power company are state-owned; indeed, you can hardly picture things working differently.
• You expect, as a matter of course, that the phones will work. Getting a new phone is routine.
• The train system is reliable and how you get to places that are too far to walk or bike. If you want to go across the sea, you'll take a ferry. If you want to go really far, you'll fly.
• You find a directly democratic system natural. You expect your elected politicians to be responsive to workers, strong on business, and concerned with the ordinary person. You find hyper-partisan systems (i.e. everyone else) corrupt.
• You absolutely expect to hear socialism seriously defended. Fascism, fuhgeddaboudit.
• Your menu of races is approximately: white (which includes Latins, Nords, and west Boreans), Monic (or "yellow" if you're old), black, brown (south Boreans, mostly), and some other assorted minor options (the line between ethnicity and race is fuzzy). You see at least a few from each group on a regular basis since Montecara is so full of tourists, Esquaricrats, and diplomats. Someone with one black and one white parent might look black or white to you; have you ever seen one?.
• You think most problems could be solved if only people would put aside their prejudices and work together.
• You take a strong court system for granted, even if you don't use it. You know that if you went into business and had problems with a customer, partner, or supplier, you could take them to court.
• You speak Montecaran and French and can understand Desenan, mostly. You'd respect someone who speaks Namorese, Literary Tuthinan, or something similarly exotic.
• You don't expect foreigners to speak your language. You get by on your French when traveling.
• You think paying income tax is for suckers.
• School is free, period. If you're a university student, the government pays you.
• University is (normally, and excluding graduate study) three years long.

Everybody knows that

• Mustard comes in jars or cans, I guess, but you don't eat it anyway. Tomato paste, on the other hand, comes in tubes or jars. Shaving cream comes in tubes or jars, too, and if you're a fancy guy (which you are), you work it up with a brush. Milk comes in shelf-stable unrefrigerated bricks, or occasionally in glass bottles.
• The day comes first: 28.4.44. If you're young, the year comes first and you use dashes: 1944-04-28. (And you know what happened on that date.)
• The decimal point is a comma. Certainly not a dot.
• A miliàrd is a thousand times a million.
• You expect marriages to be made for love, not arranged by third parties. You get married at a temple, or at the Palaço Pùblico by a bureaucrat if you prefer. You have at least a couple of witnesses at the wedding -- usually friends or siblings. And, naturally, a man gets only one wife at a time.
• If a man has sex with other men, he's a man who has sex with other men, nothing more. He might be effeminate or not.
• It's best to call people by their last name and the formal pronouns for a while until you get comfortable -- which might take months, or forever.
• If you're a woman, you might go to the beach topless, though this is disappearing now that everyone has smartphones.
• A fancy hotel room has a private bath. A cheap one has a shared bath in the hall and maybe a sink in the room.
• Foreign films are subtitled rather than dubbed unless they're for kids.
• You seriously expect to be able to transact business, or deal with the government, without paying bribes.
• If a politician has been cheating on his or her spouse, you would gossip a bit but not really care. You certainly wouldn't expect them to resign.
• Big or fancy stores will take your credit card. Little ones might not or might grouse about it, especially if your purchase is small.
• You can't be fired without a good reason. You're a union member, after all.
• What's bacon? You eat cured pig belly in several styles, usually by itself, sometimes as an ingredient in pasta or something else.

Contributions to world civilization

• You've probably seen . If you're under forty, add ; otherwise, add Il Paradiso.
• You know (music). If not, you know (old music).
• You count on excellent medical treatment. You know you're not going to die of cholera or other poor-country diseases. You expect very strong measures to be taken to save very ill babies or people in their eighties. You think dying at 65 would be a tragedy.
• You went over Latin, Conitian, and Montecaran history in school. Not much Monic or Nautasian.
• You expect the military to be a democratic institution that keeps Montecara from getting invaded again. You did your service and are still in the reserves.
• Your country has been conquered by a foreign nation (and is still traumatized by it).
• You're used to a wide variety of choices for almost anything you buy.
• You measure things in meters, kilos, and liters.
• You are not a farmer.
• Comics basically come in two varieties: hardbound books and magazines. The former tend to be the big, really popular and long-running series; the latter run the gamut from superheroes to sophisticated avant-garde stuff.
• The people who appear on the most popular talk shows are mostly actors, singers, football players, and so on, though you might get a film director, author, or other intellectual once in a while. Politicians? What a ridiculous idea!
• You drive on the right side of the road. You stop at red lights even if nobody's around, though the state has been phasing them out anyway. If you're a pedestrian and cars are stopped at a red light, you will fearlessly cross the street in front of them.
• You think of Desena a sister country that was once great and got stuck in the past, then took a few wrong turns, but is now getting back into the civilized world.
• You consider the (medium-sized car) to be a big car.
• The police aren't armed. The Dragòni are, though, and pretty heavily at that.
• If a woman is plumper than the average, it doesn't improve her looks.
• The biggest meal of the day is in the afternoon.
• The nationality people most often make jokes about is the Desenans.
• The city is safe to walk around at night. Still, it might be best to avoid places with a lot of Karazawis.

Foreign shores

• You're glad you live in such a democratic country, where you get a say on your own laws. If a politician isn't listening to you, they're clearly not doing their job.
• You wouldn't expect both inflation and unemployment to be very high (say, over 5%) at all, much less at the same time.
• You don't care very much what family someone comes from unless you're from an old senatorial family.
• The normal thing, when a couple dies, is for their estate to be divided equally between their children.
• You think of opera as a normal entertainment. You got dragged to at least one a year at school and, if you're middle- or upper-class, your parents took you pretty often. You can understand what they're singing, of course.
• Saturnalia is the biggest holiday of the year, and you spend it eating, drinking, shopping, and getting up to other kinds of mischief.
• Religion and the state have nothing to do with each other.
• You could name the capitals of all the nations in Conitia and a few major countries in the rest of the world. You could do the leaders of at least Ainin, Luziyca, Desena, and maybe a couple of others in Conitia, too.
• You've left a message at the beep. If you're young, you try to avoid it, though.
• Taxis are generally operated by foreigners, who are often deplorably ignorant about the city.
• You take a strong welfare state for granted. Serious poverty in Montecara would be a scandal.
• If you want to be a doctor, you need to get a bachelor's first and then go to medical school.
• There sure are a lot of bureaucrats.

Space and time

• If you have an appointment, you'll mutter an excuse if you're ten minutes late, and apologize profusely if it's twenty minutes. An hour late is almost inexcusable.
• If you have a business appointment or interview with someone, you expect to have that person to yourself, and the business shouldn't take more than an hour or so.
• Once you're past university, you very rarely simply show up at someone's place. People have to invite each other over, especially if a meal is involved.
• If you're talking to someone, it's normal to stand within about half a meter. Closer than that can be getting a bit intimate.
• The only thing you expect to bargain for is an apartment or house. Haggling is largely a matter of finding the hidden point that's the buyer's minimum.
• When you negotiate, you are polite, of course. There is no need to be rude, and you don't want to drive business away.